Global Marketing: What You Need to Know

Global Marketing: What You Need to Know:  from Wide Angle by Patrick Spenner
(MLC members – interested in evaluating your global marketing presence? Sign up today for our Global Marketing Anatomy, which measures your company against industry and category peers across 27 key attributes of strong global brands.)
You may have seen the news that P&G is moving top executives for its skin care and other businesses from Cincinnati to Singapore.  Global marketing is a topic I am hearing more and more about from CMOs, and so we’re tapping CEB’s global executive network to sort out rules of the road and best practices.
To that end, we recently co-hosted a global marketing summit at SABMiller’s headquarters near London.  Leaders from 20 different global marketing organizations joined us for discussions on marketing organization structure, agency management and marketing operations at a global level.
Here is what we learned:
Don’t underestimate the power of soft networks and relationships—The overriding determinant of success with regard to what organizational structure (local vs. regional vs. global, matrix vs. geographic) is most effective actually has nothing to do with structure at all.  It’s about the strength of the individual relationships, marketer-to-marketer or marketer-to-partner, around the globe.  If those connections are built on trust and the belief that the other party has best intentions for common good at heart, then org structure and who has power to do what becomes secondary.  These kinds of relationships can’t happen if marketers haven’t spent time with each other face-to-face, ideally working on something together, with give-and-take on both sides.
Manage global agency rosters for transparency and spark—Work within a single holding company? Go with a more open source model?  Restrict agency selection globally to a limited, approved list?  Give local marketing teams free reign?
This all ends up feeling like a religious debate.  The answer is, you can make just about any model work, but you have to be sure a few elements are somehow present.  You need workflow and role clarity across the agency roster.  You need to find some way of injecting and keeping the creative spark and energy.  And you want to continuously drive to create more transparency in agency spend across your markets around the globe.
Skew global resources to a handful of critical disciplines— There are two principles that should guide decisions.
Principle #1: Assume marketing activities should be done locally, closest to the consumer, unless there is a strong economic argument for doing activities globally.  Where you have global brands, you’d of course want to do marketing strategy at a global level.  But for marketing activities, the steady state should be to do those locally, with burden of proof resting on global to make the case for why activities should be done globally.
Principle #2: Skew whatever marketing resource you do have at a global level to not more than three disciplines.  Ideally, those disciplines should be the ones that, if done at world-class standard, create the most economic value for your business.  Going beyond three disciplines, for most companies, leads to spreading the peanut butter too thinly, and creates temptation for the global Leviathan to creep too far into local marketing execution.
These three takeaways are just the tip of the iceberg on challenges facing organizations as they work to successfully globalize the marketing function.  I look forward to continuing the discussion.
I hope these takeaways are useful—they’re really just the tip of the iceberg for what we discussed at the global summit.
If you’d like to dive in deeper, contact your account manager or executive advisor—we’re happy to talk it through with you.  Or check out MLC’s Anatomy of a Global Marketing Function—it’s a great way for MLC members to assess what they should prioritize on their journey to building a global marketing approach.  In fact, it may save you from costly mistakes.  We had one member marketing team recently that was ready to move forward with a series of global org structure changes, but in reviewing the Anatomy, found that they needed to step back and consider people, process, agency and technology shifts first.  Those are often less disruptive and ultimately more productive than moving boxes on org chart.  You might find the same.